The intersection of criminal law and immigration law

Under President Trump’s watch, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has kept busy arresting tens of thousands of migrants, newly obtained data reveal. From January 20, the date of Trump’s inauguration, and June 7, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division took into its custody 58,954 people. Of those, 15,594, or twenty-six percent of the total, had not been convicted of any crime.
Almost three-quarters of ERO’s arrestees—43,360 individuals—had been convicted of some crime, but the offenses varied tremendously. The most common offenses involved vehicular traffic [...]

The federal criminal justice system is squarely focused on immigration activity. In the 2016 fiscal year, 68,314 defendants were prosecuted in federal courts for federal immigration crimes, the administrative office that helps operate the federal courts reported this month. This represents forty-three percent of all people prosecuted for federal crimes that year. Two crimes made up the bulk of federal immigration crime prosecutions. Illegal entry, a misdemeanor, and its felony counterpart, illegal reentry.
No other category of federal crime came near immigration to receive top billing among [...]

As we begin to become immersed in immigration law enforcement practices under President Trump, I thought a look back at historical practices might be helpful. The information below comes entirely from DHS statistics.
President Obama’s enforcement record is familiar to crimmigration.com readers. From fiscal years 2009 to 2015, the United States removed 2,749,854 people and returned another 2,080,307. No data are available for President Obama’s last full fiscal year, FY 2016.
As defined by DHS for purposes of these statistics, “Removals are the compulsory and confirmed movement of an [...]

Top Obama administration officials have made much of their concern about the country’s outsized prison population. In 2015, President Obama famously visited a federal penitentiary, the first sitting president to ever do so. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder championed sentencing reforms targeting low-level drug offenders. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates recently announced that the Justice Department would substantially reduce its reliance on private prison operators.
But at the same time, the Obama administration has arrested and imprisoned a historically unprecedented [...]

Last week I wrote about the enormous number of migrants who face confinement while they are prosecuted for federal immigration crimes. The absolute numbers are astonishing. Almost 100,000 people suspected of engaging in nothing worse than an immigration crime were held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in fiscal year 2013 alone.
Today I remain focused on the federal government’s pretrial immigration prison population, but I take a slight different approach. To provide some context with which to understand the number of pretrial immigration crime defendants who are confined, today [...]

President Obama released the final budget request he will make to Congress earlier this month and the pitch for DHS is peppered with costly security measures that fall in line with the department’s existing operations centered on security concerns. At almost $41 billion, the DHS budget request covers everything from FEMA operations to the nation’s principal immigration law enforcement bodies, ICE and CBP. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, Budget-in-Brief: Fiscal Year 2017, at 1 (2016). Combined, the budgets for ICE and CBP comprise almost one-third (30.3 percent) of DHS’ total budget, including [...]

The number of migrants sitting behind barbed wire appears to have dropped in fiscal years 2014 and 2015, but DHS’s reporting has become so opaque that it is hard to be sure. For years, I have tracked ICE’s civil immigration detention population using annual reports issued by DHS. Those reports were posted on the DHS website for anyone with an internet connection to download and read. I regularly did so and often wrote about these trends in my scholarly articles as well as here on crimmigration.com. That has not been the case with immigration detention statistics for fiscal years 2014 or 2015. [...]

Every day the nation’s 250 or so immigration judges enter one of the 58 immigration courts and make life or death decisions. These courts are typically housed in mundane office buildings. From the outside there is little suggesting that inside those walls lives are being altered in significant, often irreversible, ways.
The federal government’s most recent statistical report about the immigration courts’ workload indicates just how important these sites are to many people. According to the Justice Department (the parent agency to the immigration courts), in fiscal year 2014, the immigration [...]

February 5: Quoted in article about Indiana death in drunk driving incident allegedly caused by unauthorized migrant [Read article here]

January 31: I'm quoted in San Francisco Chronicle about ICE's policy of arresting people in and near courthouses [Read article here]

January 18: I talked to CityLab about symbolic value of ICE raids on 7-11 stores [Read article here]

January 8: I'm quoted in Governing talking about ICE head's threats to imprison elected officials who support policies limiting cooperation with ICE [Read article here]

January 5: I'm quoted in article about San Antonio Police Department decision to prosecute alleged migrant smuggler under state law rather than hand over to ICE for federal prosecution [Read article here]

January 3: Quoted in article about ICE chief's threats to imprison elected officials who support migrant-friendly policies [Read article here]

2018

December 30: I'm quoted in The Atlantic discussing the special impact crimmigration policies have on black migrants [Read article here]

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The information contained on these pages must not be considered legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. This work by www.crImmigration.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.